Well Said

Summer School is already underway in Chapel Hill, but before we move on to the summer, we want to revisit some stories from the previous semester.

In this episode, Bill Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson eminent professor emeritus of history, tells us what it’s like to win a Grammy and Sarah Birken, an assistant professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, shares how difficult it is to start a new podcast.

Chapel Hill was bustling with graduates and their supporters over the weekend as Carolina celebrated more than 6,000 students who are prepared to take on the biggest problems around the world.

With words of advice from Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and alumni Ramesh Raskar and Jonathan Reckford, the graduates turned their tassels and became Carolina alumni at Doctoral Hooding and Spring Commencement.

This episode of Well Said captures the excitement of Commencement weekend and the thoughtful advice graduates received before heading out on their next adventures.

As the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, Carolina alumnus Jonathan Reckford knows a thing or two about the value of home.

“When you think about the idea of home, it’s really a foundation and a launching pad for the kind of lives we want everyone to have the opportunity to have," said Reckford, who graduated from Carolina in 1984 with a degree in political science.

The Chapel Hill native will return home on Sunday to deliver Carolina’s Commencement address, in which he will challenge the Class of 2019 to aspire toward bigger ambitions.

“I think sometimes we settle to lightly for either material things or for short-term happiness against that deep reward of finding real joy that comes from deep relationships and losing yourself in a purpose bigger than yourself,” he said.

On this week’s episode, Reckford will share the experiences he had at Carolina that served as a launching pad for his career of serving others.

Flavio Frohlich has always been interested in the human brain.

He became even more interested in its inner-workings after learning how brain cells produce a small amount of electricity, which results in “rhythms” in the brain.

Even more interesting was his discovery that rhythms would respond to electric stimulation.

When he arrived at Carolina in 2011, he recruited a team of students and academic colleagues to investigate the possibility that small electric charges could alter the brain rhythm of patients with schizophrenia.

“We have a good scientific understanding of what to give to whom in terms of strength of the stimulation or duration of the stimulation,” said Frohlich, an associate professor. “There’s all these different things that you can choose when you do brain stimulation, which you can't really with medication. But with stimulation, millisecond-to-millisecond you can define and individualize how you want to stimulate.”

Now, the team is applying those findings to depression.

On this week's episode of Well Said, Frohlich discusses his team's research and how low-level electric stimulation on the brain can be used to treat chronic pain and mental illnesses.

On a previous episode, global studies associate professor Jonathan Weiler and political science professor Marc Hetherington discussed the political divide in the United States. This week, the conversation continues on how our choices — such as the coffee brand we drink or the car we drive — can cause others to assume our political preferences.

“These non-political tastes and preferences are just such clear political signals nowadays,” Weiler said. “You tell me what kind of food or beer you like, and I download a whole bunch of associations about you and how you see the world, and who you probably voted for."

Weiler and Hetherington, co-authors of Prius or Pickup?: How the answers to four simple questions explain America’s great divide, believe that the root of the acrimonious divide in the United States spawns from the growing affinity Americans have for their own political party, and in turn, the adversarial feelings developed for those across the aisle.

“Our identities are so driven by how negatively we feel about our opponents,” Hetherington said. “One of the odd things that's happened in this period of polarization is that we don't love our own side any more than we used to, but what we really have grown to do is hate the other side.”

On this week's episode, Weiler and Hetherington discuss their research and how stereotypes are adding to the challenges of the political divide.

Like many kids, Matt Cannon grew up playing video games. For him, it was a hobby that eventually grew to something much more substantial.

Cannon spent years playing and coaching video games professionally, even while he was a student at Carolina.

He made his mark in Overwatch, a first-person shooter game with several modes of competitive play, but retired as a player in 2016. Cannon still maintains a top-500 rank in North America, and he retired as a coach in 2018 with six tournament championships.

Now, he's helping Carolina enter the esports world.

On this episode of Well Said, this Tar Heel explains how Carolina keeps calling him home and how he hopes to make collegiate esports more mainstream.

When Kate Sheppard graduated from college in 2006, the path for young journalists was pretty straightforward. You started at a small, local paper, then moved onto a bigger one and then a regional newspaper.

Maybe then you’d make it to a big market like Washington, D.C.

But Sheppard, an enterprise editor at the HuffPost, said that path is fundamentally broken now because the current business model in journalism isn't working.

As a teaching associate professor at the UNC School of Media and Journalism, she works with students to reshape the future of journalism in her class called “Creating Tomorrow’s News Products.”

On this week’s episode, Sheppard explains how she encourages her students to explore problems and develop ideas — while teaching them valuable lessons they’ll need throughout their journalism careers.

UNC School of Government professor Anita Brown-Graham fell in love with North Carolina when she first attended UNC-Chapel Hill as a law student.

Now, she’s giving back to the state through ncIMPACT.

Brown-Graham’s goal in launching ncIMPACT in 2017 was to find solutions to significant issues like human trafficking and the state's opioid crisis by bringing resources to communities across North Carolina and embracing the idea of teamwork to find solutions for these statewide problems.

The initiative aims to tackle all sides of a problem by recruiting experts from Carolina’s School of Medicine, Eshelman School of Pharmacy, School of Social Work, Gillings School of Global Public Health and School of Law.

“There's something very magical that happens in the room,” Brown-Graham said. “I'm just always reminded when I'm in the room with them about not just the enormity of what we've taken on, but about the hardiness of the human spirit.”

As the scope of work grew, ncIMPACT also grew into a different resource for North Carolina. First airing in February, ncIMPACT developed television segments highlighting these issues in the state, with Brown-Graham serving as the host for the 20-minute segment, which airs every Thursday at 8 p.m. on UNC-TV.

When Amy Locklear Hertel enrolled at Carolina in 1993, she wanted to join the Greek community, but as a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she couldn’t find an organization that fit her needs culturally.

"We needed something uniquely matriarchal that represented our nature of our tribes," said Hertel, who now serves as the chief of staff to Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz.

She and three other students decided to create their own sorority to express themselves and to help retain native women at Carolina.

Alpha Pi Omega was established in 1994 as the first historically American Indian sorority in the country. In 1995, the organization inducted its first pledge class, the 15 Warrior Women. Since the induction of that first class, chapters have been established at North Carolina State University, UNC-Pembroke, Oklahoma State University, Dartmouth College and others.

On this week’s episode, Hertel and other founding members — called The Four Winds — tell us what it means to them to have a lasting legacy of leadership and sisterhood.

In the workplace, the terms “status” and “power” are often used interchangeably, but they're not really true synonyms.

“Status and power are both associated with hierarchy in groups and organizations,” said Alison Fragale, associate professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business, “but they have different definitions. They are theoretically and conceptually different.”

According to Fragale, power is measured by the number of resources one controls — like the office budget. Status, on the other hand, is a measurement of how well-liked someone is. These two factors, when considered together, consequently cause people to stereotype their co-workers.

These stereotypes are hard enough for many to manage when a person holds a leadership role, but it's an especially difficult balance for women, Fragale said.

“Women are supposed to show up as high on the warm-cold dimension,” she explained, “and leaders are supposed to show up as high on the dominant dimension. That doesn't mean they can't be warm as well, but what ends up happening is if those stereotypes conflict. What I expect of a good leader is to be confident, assertive, ambitious and decisive. And what I expect of a good woman is to be other-oriented, nurturing, caring and kind.”

And when those stereotypes clash, it can create problems.

In this episode of Well Said, Fragale of UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business discusses stereotype conflict often found in the workplaces of female leaders, and how it can be managed.